CSEES Announces the Establishment of a New Slovene Research Initiative

by Eileen KunklerDuring the spring and summer of 2013, the Center for Slavic

and East European Studies (CSEES) led by director Yana Hasham-ova, pursued the founding of a new Slovene Research Initiative at Ohio State. The initiative, which will be finalized in December, will support the advancement of research on Slovenia, Central Europe, and Southeastern Europe and allow for the exchange of OSU faculty and visiting scholars. The new program also will promote lectures and provide grants and scholarships for faculty and students en-gaged in this area of the world.

The collaboration is made possible through an endowment from the Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Slovene Ministry of Science and Education. Dr. Yana Hashamova and Dr. Oto Luther, the director of the Research Center, worked throughout the spring, summer, and fall to bring the concept to fruition. The Society for Slovene Studies under the leadership of Dr. Raymond Miller (Bowdoin College) and active par-ticipation of Dr. Carol Rogel (faculty emeritus, OSU) and Dr. Tim Pogacar (Bowling Green State University) also played an integral role in moving the idea forward and will collaborate with initiative events in the future.

In May 2014, CSEES will host the first visiting scholar. Dr. Luka Vidmar will stay in Columbus during the month of May to network with U.S. scholars and conduct research. In the coming months, plans will be worked out for a full line-up of events during the initiative’s first year in 2014-2015. Without a doubt the new Slovene Research Initiative will open a new chapter for CSEES in the coming years.

Much thanks to Dr. Hashamova, Dr. Luthar, Dr. Miller, Dr. Rogel, Dr. Pogacar, and Elise Burgess for their work to finalize this new exciting initiative!

From the Director 2Slavic Dept. Promotions 3Faculty/Student Updates 4-5Alumni Spotlight 4Service Learning Project 6 ASEEES Participants 7Fulbright/Student Summer 8Polish Studies Grants 9New Students 10

CSEES Director Yana Hashamova in Ljubljana, Slovenia

CSEES Director: Yana HashamovaAssistant Director: Eileen KunklerOffice Coordinator: Maryann Walther-Keisel Outreach Coordinator: Derek PetersonStudent Assistant: Andrew ZhangStudent Assistant: Taylor ReynoldsStudent Assistant: Travis Frederick

Volume 41, Issue 1

Autumn 2013

Professor Myroslava Mudrak Retires

by Maryann Walther-Keisel Dear Colleagues, Students, Alumni, and Friends of Slavic,

Just a few days ago, we celebrated Thanks-giving and, as CSEES director, I am genuinely grateful for the fascinating work of our faculty

and students, for their intellectual pursuits and excellence in teaching and learning, and for their selfless community engage-ment.

Most likely you already know our mission as a National Resource Center and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants awarding unit and this year, as always, we continue to seed lan-guage and area studies courses, sponsor visiting scholars and instructors, organize conferences and events, and award FLAS fellowships. This calendar year, 285 students took courses fully or partially funded by us and 42 students further developed their language and area studies knowledge through FLAS fellowships. We funded or co-sponsored 7 conferences and art exhibits that were attended by 70,795 experts, educators, and members of the general public.

In addition to our goal as a National Resource Center, we have successfully pursued opportunities to advance the scholarship and teaching of languages and cultures on specific countries or regions from our areas. This is the second year of our Pol-ish Studies Initiative, which promoted 7 events and awarded 18 grants and fellowships. With the support and partnership of our colleagues from the Research Center of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts, one more initiative for the advancement of Slovene, Central European, and Southeast European studies is in the process of being finalized. I am particularly grateful to Dr. Oto Luthar, the Research Center’s director, for his leadership and collaboration.

This coming spring is particularly important as we will be com-peting again for Title VI and FLAS grants. During the upcoming months your inspiration, ideas, and cooperation are particularly important and will determine our success. If you have any ideas for collaboration, please do not hesitate to communicate them to us.

With deep gratitude to our sponsors, I ask you to give today and support our students and programs!

With season’s greetings,

Yana Hashamova

Dr. Myroslava M. Mudrak taught art history at The Ohio State University and has been an active faculty associate of the Center for Slavic and East European Studies for more than 30 years. During that time she has offered no less than seven courses highlighting Russian and East European art; guided almost a dozen stu-dents to Slavic studies and history of art MA’s and PhD’s; advised OSU’s Ukrainian Club; won

many grants and awards from OSU and other institu-tions; published books, articles and catalogues; and brought speakers and exhibits to OSU to enrich our artistic and cultural under-standing of Eastern Europe, Russia and Ukraine.Professor Mudrak

came to OSU in 1982 after receiving her PhD in History at the University of Texas at Austin in 1980. She achieved rank of full professor in 2004 and acted as chair of the History of Art Department from 2003 to 2004. Since 1989, she has also been a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences. During her tenure at OSU, Dr. Mudrak has also spent time abroad with grants for research in the Czech Republic, Poland, Russia and Ukraine. Her research and teaching specializations include Eastern European Modernism, contemporary art in Eastern Europe and Russia, Russian/So-viet avant-garde art and Ukrainian art.

At the end of the 2012-2013 academic year, Dr. Mudrak retired from OSU with emerita status. The Department of History of Art marked her departure with a symposium in her honor on October 5, 2013, which included presentations by her PhD advisees, former students, and cur-rent faculty. The Slavic Center wishes to thank Dr. Mudrak for her long and valued affiliation with our program and hopes that she will have a productive and happy retirement filled with more of the fascinating works her career has brought into our lives.

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Volume 41, Issue 1: Autumn 2013

Slavic Department Promotions by Maryann Walther-Keisel

Dr. Hashamova holds PhDs in Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She came to OSU in 2001, and has been the director of the Center for Slavic and East European Studies since 2009. Dr. Hashamova has also recently been appoint-ed as chair of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Her work focuses on Russian and Balkan film and culture, compara-tive literature and the arts, critical theory, and identity and gender studies. She strives to establish links between political ideology, critical psychoanalysis, and cinema, while analyzing post-Soviet conditions. Her most recent work explores film representations of trafficking in women. Among other achieve-ments, she is co-principal investigator on a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a Sawyer Seminar in 2013-2014 that compares culture, lan-guage, religion, and nationalism in the Balkans and South Asia. Dr. Hashamo-va’s article “War Rape: (Re)defining Motherhood Fatherhood and Nationhood” in Embracing Arms: Cultural Representations of Slavic and Balkan Women in War (co-edited with Helena Goscilo, 2012), on which she presented the OSU Arts and Humanities lecture on October 8, has received the 2013 American Women in Slavic Studies Heldt Prize.

Dr. Brintlinger came to OSU in 1994 after receiving a PhD from the University of Wisconsin in Slavic Languages and Literatures. Her research interests re-late to Russian literature and culture from the 18th to the 21st centuries. Dr. Brintlinger’s most recent work looks at the experience of war in Soviet culture in the 20th century and the war hero as a trope in literature. In 2012, she pub-lished two books: Children of Chapaev and his Comrades: War and The Russian Literary Hero across the Twentieth Century and Chekhov for the 21st Century. In Autumn 2013, she returned to OSU after spending spring semester as a Ful-bright Distinguished Chair of East European Studies at the University of Warsaw, in Warsaw, Poland, where she taught and conducted research for her project “World War II, Afghanistan, and Chechnya in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture.”

The Ohio State University Board of Trustees voted in June to promote Drs. Yana Hashamova and Angela Brintlinger to the status of Professor effective September 2013. Both are faculty in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures.

Dr. Brintlinger’s Arts and Humanities inaugural lecture will take place Wednes-day, February 26, 2014 at 5:00pm in the Grand Lounge of the OSU Faculty Club.

Congratulations on your promotion Dr. Hashamova and Dr. Brintlinger!

I graduated from the Center at Ohio State two years ago with an MA in Slavic and East European studies. During my time there I took a variety of courses all over the university, but my focus during that time was always Russian and Central Asian literature. The Center’s interdisciplinary program gave me the chance to pursue that interest by offering high level Russian and Uzbek language courses, a number of Russian literature classes, and even allowing me to take Persian while learning the Tajik dialect on my own time.

Thanks to the opportunities afforded me at the Center I have been able to further pursue my goal of an academic career. When applying for PhD programs in Russian literature, because of the experience

I gained at OSU, I was a very competitive candidate. I received offer letters from most of the schools I applied to and decided to matriculate to the University of Michigan because the program atmosphere is very similar to that of the Center.

Finally, again owing to the Center’s program, this last summer I participated in the CLS program for Persian in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. The fact that I took beginning Persian in my last year of the MA program has actually been a great boon to my career (and my graduate finances). Upon matriculation to Michigan, I received a FLAS for second-year Tajik and the following year received one for third-year Tajik. And, of course, Tajik, and not Uzbek because of the politics of Uzbekistan, ended up being my first entry, hopefully of many, into Central Asia.

Faculty:Bear Braumoeller received the International Studies Associa-tion (ISA) Best Book Award, for his book, The Great Powers and the International System: Systemic Theory in Empirical Perspective.

Nick Breyfogle published “The Fate of Fishing in Tsarist Rus-sia: The Human-Fish Nexus in Lake Baikal,” Sibirica: Inter-disciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies and “The Possibilities of Empire: Russian Sectarian Migration to South Caucasia and the Refashioning of Social Boundaries,” in Migration and Membership Regimes in Global and Historical Perspec-tive, eds. Ulbe Bosma, Gijs Kessler, and Leo Lucassen. This summer, he presented papers on the environmental history of Lake Baikal at three international conferences in Beijing, Montpellier, and St. Petersburg. As part of a multi-year, multinational fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, “Explor-ing Russia’s Environmental History and Natural Resources” http://www.york.ac.uk/history/research/majorprojects/rus-siasenvironmentalhistory/, on which Breyfogle is co-PI, he travelled for research to Solovki in the White Sea in August. Read his blog from the Solovki trip here: https://u.osu.edu/breyfogle.1/ and also read about the research trip here: http://artsandsciences.osu.edu/news/breaking-fresh-ground-environmental-history-takes-to-the-field.

Angela Brintlinger gave three invited talks during spring semester. In April she lectured on Ivan Bunin for the Artes Liberales faculty at University of Warsaw, and in May she spoke on “Translators and Translations: Traces of Dovlatov in Stephen Dixon’s Phone Rings” for the U of Warsaw English Department. In April she also travelled to the other UW, Uni-versity of Wisconsin, where she participated in a symposium in honor of Judith Kornblatt. Her talk, “Last Words, or Looking

Backward: The Case of the Boys of ’24,” drew on her recent research. An article version of that talk, entitled “Last Words, or Looking Backward: Soviet War Fiction and the Case of the Boys of ’24,” will be published in December in the Jubilee Volume in Honor of Richard Pipes, Piotr Wandycz and Zbig-niew Wójcik, ed. Jan Malicki and Andrzej Nowak, Studium Europy Wschodniej (Warsaw). Theodora Dragostinova received an honorable mention for the Edmund Keeley Book Prize for her book Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration Among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900-1949.

Yana Hashamova received the 2013 Heldt Prize for Best Article in Slavic/Eastern European/Eurasian Women’s Studies from the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (AWSS) for her article “War Rape: (Re)defining Motherhood, Fatherhood, and Nationhood.”

David Hoffmann received an Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. 16 Arts and Sciences faculty members represented the college in all five of the university’s top award categories that recognize and honor outstanding performance and com-mitment to our land grant mission of scholarship, teaching, and service.

Myroslava M. Mudrak published “On the Liminality of Being and Belonging: The Ukrainian Studio of Plastic Arts (1923-1952)—A National Culture on Foreign Territory,” in Centropa.

Jennifer Suchland co-edited a special issue of Feminist Formations on “Feminists Interrogate States of Emergency” found here: http://www.feministformations.org/journal/cur-rent.html#sthash.Y1p5LVhc.dpbs. She presented on the

Faculty and Student News

Center for Slavic and East European Studies

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Alumni Spotlight: Christopher Fort

Volume 41, Issue 1: Autumn 2013

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Russian punk band Pussy Riot at Williams College in February 2013. She also received an OIA grant to conduct research on new “Left-East” anti-austerity movements in Eastern Europe. Gleb Tsipursky published an article, “Conformism and Agency: Model Young Communists and the Komsomol Press in the Later Khrushchev Years, 1961-1964,” in Europe-Asia Studies. He also published a chapter titled “Sovetskaia molodezh’ v epokhu ‘ottepeli’: povedencheskie modeli” in an edited volume, Aktual’nyie problemy rossiiskoi tsivilizatsii i metodiki prepodo-vaniia istorii. Sbornik materialov VI Mezhvuzovskoi nauchnoi konferentsii. His piece, “Class-sourcing Slavic and Eurasian Studies: Teaching Students, Serving the Public and Staying Relevant”, came out in the professional newsletter of the Asso-ciation for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in June 2013.

Students:Michael Furman publsihed “Impoliteness and mock-impolite-ness: A descriptive analysis” in Approaches to Slavic Interac-tion, edited by Nadine Thielemann and Peter Kosta. Amster-dam: John Benjamins. He also gave a presentation at Lakeland Community College titled “Down with Drunkards!” Envisioning the Temperate Worker Under the First Five year Plan.”

Marta Kołczynska published “On the Asphalt Path to Divinity. Contemporary Transformations in Albanian Bektashism: The Case of Sari Saltik Teqe in Kruja” in the Anthropological Journal of European Cultures.

Justin Wilmes was named an alternate for the Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship in October. He also published a review of the film Dialogues (2012) in the journal KinoKultura.

Faculty and Student News

Polish Journalist Comes to ColumbusBy Derek Peterson

On November 12th, 2013, award winning Polish journalist Witold Szablowski came to Columbus to participate in an interview with the Columbus Council on World Affairs (CCWA). Mr. Szablowski sat down with Patrick Terrien, the president and CEO of CCWA, to discuss his experiences as a foreign journalist in Turkey, connection and background in the genre of Polish literary reportage and past and current book projects. Mr. Szablowski has written about a variety of issues, including immigration in the EU, the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II (the subject of his new book, The Assassin from Apricot City, and his family’s experience trying to live like they were in 1981 Poland. His current project is examining the habits and treatment of trained bears in Bulgaria.

Mr. Szablowski’s busy day in Columbus continued into the afternoon, as he came to The Ohio State University to have a discussion with Jessie Labov (Slavic department) about his work and his roots in literary reportage. OSU students and faculty had the opportunity to participate in the conversation with Mr. Szablowski as he shared details about his writing and showed photos of how he and his family lived like they were back in 1981. After the talk, the audience had time to interact one-on-one with Mr. Szablowski and ask him further questions about his work.

Mr. Szablowski’s trip to Columbus was possible thanks to the Polish Studies Initiative, the Center for Slavic and East European Studies, the Polish Cultural Institute, New York and the Polish Support Fund.

CSEES Service Learning Project

On Saturday, November 23, several students from the Slavic Center braved the November cold to volunteer at Franklinton Gardens. Meagan Chandler, Justin Faircloth, Molly Reed, Carrie Ann Morgan, Anthony Adame, and Lauren Post, along with volunteer coordinator Megan Ogle, harvested Russet and red potatoes and helped to prepare the gardens for the upcoming winter. Along with harvesting potatoes, the volunteers learned about the project’s aims and some useful gardening tips!

F r a n k l i n t o n Gardens is a local non-profit urban farm in Columbus located in the historic Franklinton neighborhood. Its main goals are to grow healthy food in order to

empower citizens in the neighborhood and to reclaim abandoned urban spaces. Since its inception in 2007, it has grown to several neighborhood lots and continues to expand.

Center for Slavic and East European Studies

International Film Conference:Adaptation: Russian Text into Film

The international film conference “Adaptation: Russian Text into Film”, organized by Alexander Burry (Ohio State Uni-versity) and Frederick White (Utah Valley University), was held at The Ohio State University on May 9-11, 2013. Prominent Slav-ists from the U.S., Canada, Britain, the Netherlands, and Bel-gium attended the conference. Several graduate students from the Slavic department at Ohio State also took part in the event, which was sponsored by the Center for Slavic and East Euro-pean Studies, the Department of Slavic and East European Lan-guages and Cultures, the Division of Arts and Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences, the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, and the OSU Film Studies Program. Film adaptation ex-plores the transposition of texts from one medium to another. This conference focused on the transformation of famous Rus-sian literary works as they move across borders into new media, new countries, and new social and political contexts.

The conference began with a keynote address by Thomas Leitch, director of film studies at the University of Delaware and author of Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ (2007). The address, en-titled “Hollywood Takes Russia,” explored the motivations be-hind American cinema’s frequent forays into Russia and Rus-sian literature, from political positioning to the sheer pleasure of exoticism. Over the following days panels explored treatments of texts by Nabokov, Aksenov, Chekhov, and Dostoevskii; Ameri-can adaptations of Russian texts; and post-Soviet approaches to adaptation. Presenters from OSU included Helena Goscilo on “Dostoevskii’s Centripetal Demonism as German Apoca-lypse in Visconti’s La caduta degli dei,” Alexander Burry’s “A Vicious Circle”: Shakhnazarov’s Adaptation of Ward No. 6,” and David McVey on “Stepping over International Borders in

Crime and Punishment: Transgressing New Divides with Aki Kaurismäki’s Rikos ja rangaistus,” along with several others. Co-organizer Frederick White spoke on Leonid Andreev in a talk called “A Slap in the Face of American Cinematic Taste.” The conference resulted in an edited volume on adaptations of Russian texts under the title Border Crossings: Russian Literature into Film. Currently in progress, the book features contributions from a number of conference participants.

In the 2013 May Session, the Cross-National Studies: Interdisciplinary Research and Training Program – CONSIRT (consirt.osu.edu) at The Ohio State University (OSU) and the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) organized the Workshop on Panel Design and Analysis (POLPAN Workshop), featur-ing the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN 1988 – 2013. This lon-gitudinal survey is conducted on a national sample of Polish citizens in five year waves beginning with 1988. The POL-PAN Workshop was open to graduate students in the social sciences. Funding for the Workshop came from the POL-PAN grant, the OSU Department of Sociology and the OSU Polish Studies Initiative. The first segment of the POLPAN Workshop (week one, May 6-12), devoted to practicalities of designing and collecting longitudinal survey data, was held at PAN, in Warsaw. Participants attended lectures by, and discussed with, experts in methodology who designed POLPAN and administered it over the last two decades. Topics ranged from sampling to item design, including special topics on the history of sociological panel studies in Central and East-ern Europe, and life-course studies. The second segment (week two, May 20-26) took place on OSU Main Campus, at the Department of Sociol-ogy. It featured POLPAN to train participants in quantitative analyses of panel data and included advanced statistical topics, from multilevel modeling to latent class growth mod-els. In addition, the Columbus workshop devoted a Special Session – open and free of charge to interested faculty and students – to Health and Wellbeing in Dynamic Perspective. Participants discussed substantive and methodological is-sues that could be addressed with POLPAN. The unique structure of the POLPAN Workshop in-volved the participation of two groups of graduate students. The international exchange group consisted of two OSU and three PAN students who attended both the Warsaw and the Columbus segments of the Workshop. CONSIRT also selected a second group of graduate students who met on the premises of the host institutions – in Warsaw and in Co-lumbus, respectively.

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CONSIRT Workshop on Panel Design and AnalysisBy: Irina Tomescu-Dubrow

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Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Participants- November 21-24, 2013

Volume 41, Issue 1: Autumn 2013

Joe Brandesky presented “Spectacular St. Petersburg: The Modernist Revolution Onstage, 1910-1995”

Nicholas Breyfogle presented “Saving the Sable: Science, Conservation, and the Barguzin Nature Preserve”

Angela Brintlinger presented “Russo-Persian Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange: A.S. Griboedov and Khosrow Mirza in 1829”

Alexander Burry was the discussant on the panels “Revolutionary Tolstoy III: Tolstoy and Aesthetics” and “News From No-where: Dispatches from the Late Nineteenth-Century Russian Countryside”

John Davis presented “Women’s Professional Development in Tsarist and Soviet Medical Microbiology, 1900-1930”

Theodora Dragostinova participated in the roundtable “Connecting Histories: Thinking Transnationally East and West”

Helena Goscilo presented “Seduction or Induction of the Young via Visuals?” and was the discussant on the panel “Satirical Revolution”

Yana Hashamova presented “Screening Minorities in Bulgarian Media: (Re)Negotiating Religious and Gender Identities” and was the chair of the panel “The Intersectionality of Exploitation in the post-Soviet Region: Historical Perspectives”

Mary-Allen Johnson participated in the roundtable “Digital Humanities II: We Need to Do More about Digital Humanities”

Jessie Labov participated in the roundtable “Monetary Deficit, Creative Surplus: Austerity Measures and their Impact on East European Film” and was the chair of the panel “Social Movements and Neoliberalism in the Postsocialist World #6: Gender, Activism, and Cultural Commodity”

Ian Lanzillotti presented “Dmitrii Kodzokov: Native Elites and the Peasant Reforms in Tsarist Caucasia”

David McVey was the discussant on the panel “Creating Alternative Identities on Screen: From Soviet-era Polish Auteur to Contemporary Russian Cinema”

Robert Mulcahy presented “Battling Brotherhoods: Timur Bekmambetov’s Hollywood Productions”

Natalie Oleksyshyn presented “We Will R.E.P. You: Undermining Central Ideologies in Liminal Spaces”

Carole Rogel was the chair of the panel “Current Developments in Slovenian Foreign Policy: Croatia, EU Enlargement, and Other Challenges and was the meeting moderator of the panel “Special Session of the Slovene Studies Society”

Mark Sokolsky presented “V. K. Arsen’ev and the Challenges of ‘Green Imperialism’ in the Russian Far East”

Gleb Tsipursky was the chair for the panel “Living Deviantly in the Brezhnev Era: Pot, Petty Crime, and Street Demonstrations” and presented “Soviet Jazz Networks in the Thaw”

Justin Wilmes presented “National Identity (De)Construction in the Russian New Wave: Kirill Serebrennikov’s ‘Iur’ev Day’ (2008) and Sergei Loznitsa’s ‘My Joy’ (2010)”

Spring Semester Advanced Russian Table

Advanced Russian Table will meet every Monday at Woody’s Tavern in the Ohio Union at 5:00pm beginning January 6, 2014.

Center for Slavic and East European Studies

OSU HISTORY GRADS WIN FULBRIGHT-HAYESby Maryann Walther-Keisel

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Two former Slavic Center graduate student FLAS fellows are both 2013-2014 recipients of prestigious Fulbright-Hays grants from the U.S. Department of Education. Kirsten Hildonen (FLAS for Serbo-Croatian, 2010-2011) and Ian John-son (FLAS for Russian, 2011-2012), both from the Department of History, were selected from a pool of over 300 national ap-plicants to participate in the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Disserta-tion Research Abroad program. Hildonen’s doctoral studies focus on modern Eastern Europe & Russia with a focus on Southeastern Europe. Her particular research interests include pre-Communist Yugoslavia, war and occupation, issues of nationality, urban spaces, discours-es of power, and social history. The Fulbright grant will allow her to travel to Serbia to focus her research on the practices of everyday life and the fluidity of community relations in the context of violent conflict during the period of German military and political occupation in Belgrade during World War II.

Johnson’s dissertation will cover Soviet and German military cooperation in the interwar period, focusing on four secret facilities built in Russia in the 1920s and operated jointly until 1933. During his grant period, he will conduct research in Russia to explore in depth the secret treaty signed by the Germans and the Soviets that laid the groundwork for a coop-erative military program. Johnson describes the program as a wager – an exchange of Soviet space for German technology – upon which World War II would turn.

Four researchers from the Ukraine are learning first-hand about American agriculture systems from faculty at Ohio State. Through the USDA’s Agricultural Economics Faculty Exchange Program (FEP), which is administered through the organization’s Foreign Agricultural Service, the research-ers – Nataliia Gerasymenko, Oksana Makarchuk, Inna Mazii, and Olha Ostroverkh – are spending four months in the U.S. working with faculty and students from Ohio State’s De-partment of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics (AEDE) to gain an in-depth understanding of U.S. food and agricultural economic systems. AEDE’s professor Stan Thompson and professor emeritus Allan Lines serve as co-directors of the project for Ohio State.

This past summer, I had to opportunity to study Uzbek in Dushanbe, Tajikistan through the American Councils Eurasia Program. This was my second trip into the former Soviet Union, but it still left me with a variety of new experiences. My time in Dushanbe was a bit different from my fellow students, as I was the only one studying Uzbek, making my Russian skills incredibly useful for getting around the city. Aside from the intense Central Asian heat (it was routinely over 110 degrees), one of the first things I was taken aback by was the incredibly generous hospitality of not only my host family, but other people around the city. It was not un-common to see guests,Tajik or foreign, offered whole meals at 10:00pm upon arriving at the host’s residence. The cuisine, while dramatically different from my normal diet, was amaz-

ing and something I have missed almost daily since I returned.

Another striking aspect of Du-shanbe was its location. While the climate is largely a desert one, there are stunning mountains surround-ing the city, which offer breathtak-ing views. My travels in Dushanbe helped me further develop my foreign language skills and give me valuable experience in Central Asia, which in turn will aid me in my

pursuit of a PhD. After the trip concluded, I returned home with great memories, new perspectives to improve my study of the region and an antique Soviet gas mask, which made customs even more interesting than it usually is.

Eight Weeks in Dushanbe by Derek Peterson

Interning with the Defense Departmentby Katie Johnson

This past summer, I had the opportunity to intern with the De-partment of Defense at NORAD/USNORTHCOM in Colorado Springs, Colorado. As an intern, I had the duties of a full-time, albeit one who was obviously still learning, intelligence analyst. My placement enabled me to utilize my Russian area studies and language skills, while giving me knowledge of Russian affairs unmatched by mere classroom interaction. My day-to-day duties normally consisted of researching informa-tion, writing articles, and attending and participating in infor-mational meetings. I also had the opportunity while there to attend conference proceedings, experience the duties differ-ent branches in the command carried out, receive both peer driven and command wide training, and make general con-tacts within the command and greater intelligence community.

Ukrainian Researchers Come to OSU

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Polish Studies Initiative Research Grant Recipients

Paul Niebrzydowski:

The PSI grant financed a preliminary research trip to begin work on my dissertation, which examines the work of the American Relief Administration (ARA) in Poland and Austria after World War One. Specifically, I looked at how the na-scent Polish state cooperated with the ARA while facing first the challenge of demobilization of the German army and then the outbreak of the Polish-Bolshevik war. I examined how indigenous Polish charitable organizations, both secular and religious, as well as early public health structures that emerged during the Regency government under German oc-cupation, allowed for the success of the ARA’s relief mission, which I seek to illustrate as an endeavor that in many ways transcended national boundaries. In Poland, I first visited state archives in Lodz and Warsaw to trace the work of public health officials. I spent roughly three weeks in each location. I then followed the distribution of relief to local archives, in-cluding dioceses and convent archives in Bialystok and Krakow, where I spent about one week. I am currently using the results of that trip to apply for year-long fellowships that will allow me to complete the dissertation.

Ian Johnson:

This summer, with financial support from PSI, I traveled from Berlin (where I was living) to War-saw. I spent more than a week there researching an article that I hope to have published next spring. Researching at the Archiwum Akt Nowych, I read through the journals and reports of ma-jor Polish figures in the Battle of Warsaw, including corps commanders and intelligence officials. My article explores the Polish military’s success in breaking Red Army codes during the critical moments in the battle of Warsaw, 1920. A team of mathematicians, students and cryptologists managed to decipher messages showing a gap in Soviet lines which the Poles used to gain vic-tory. This victory meant the survival of the young Polish Republic. I hope to complete my article in early spring.

Justin Wilmes:

I spent the summer in Krakow, Poland through a FLAS grant, supplemented by a Polish Studies Initiative research grant. I studied Polish at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and advanced from an OPI level of Advanced Mid to Advanced High. In addition, I spent two weeks researching Polish-langauge criticism of Boleslaw Prus’s novel The Doll. I am incorporating this research into an article I hope to submit in the coming months, titled “Dramatizing Dualism: Dialogism and the Use of the Literary Double in Boleslaw Prus’s The Doll.”

Last summer, three OSU graduate students, Justin Wilmes, Ian Johnson and Paul Niebrzydowski, traveled to Poland with the assistance of research grants from the Polish Studies Initiative. Each of the three students will present on their research in the upcoming spring semester. Congratulations on your awards, Justin, Ian and Paul! We look forward to hearing more about your work on Poland!

Center for Slavic and East European Studies

Welcome New CSEES Graduate Students!

Will Bezbatchenko is a dual degree student studying at the Center for Slavic and East European Studies as well as the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. He graduated from The Ohio State University in 2013 with a BA in Russian and International Studies, Security and Intelligence. Will has also studied abroad in Russia twice, travelling to Moscow in the summer of 2011 and St. Petersburg in the summer of 2012. His primary focus is Russia and plans on working in government after graduation. Caroline Chimchenko graduated from The Ohio State University in 2013 with a BA in Russian and Linguistics. She is interested in sociolinguistics in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, but also Ukraine and Russia. Caroline plans to pursue work in intelligence as an interpreter. Justin Faircloth graduated from the University of Maryland with a BA in criminal justice, while also studying Russian and Arabic. He is currently studying Russian, political science and history. After graduation, Justin plans on pursuing a career in the government. Carrie Ann Morgan graduated magna cum laude from The Ohio State University with philosophy and history BAs and a Russian minor. Since graduation in 2008, she has studied Russian and Albanian, taught English, tutored Albanian, and translated while living in Albania and Russia. As a result, she has developed an interest in translation, foreign language pedagogy, and national identities as they relate to language and religion in the Balkans. Hence, she is excited to start studying Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and to participate in the Sawyer Seminar. Ioannis Pavlou graduated from Capital University with a BA in History. He is interested in studying Greece and the Balkans. Ioannis plans to pursue a PhD and attain a career in higher education. Lauren Post graduated cum laude from St. John Fisher College located in Rochester, New York. There she double

-majored in political science and English and double minored in international studies and economics. Her interests are political rhetoric and propaganda as rhetoric in communist Poland and Czechoslovakia. She is also interested in current women’s issues in Eastern Europe, with a focus on the Czech Republic and Poland. Upon graduation, Lauren would like to seek a position in government or higher education. Molly Reed graduated with a BA in Russian and Biophysics from the University of Pennsylvania. She spent a summer in Vladimir, Russia, attending an intensive language program, and has recently begun studying Uzbek. Her academic interests include scientific and environmental issues in Russia and Eastern Europe. She is interested in a career with the government or in higher education.

10 http://slaviccenter.osu.edu/

CSEES Says Goodbye to Long Time Staff Member and Welcomes New Outreach Coordinatorby Eileen Kunkler

After four long years, working as CSEES’ outreach coordinator for two years and a student worker for another two, Jordan Peters left the Center in August 2013 to start graduate school. Jordan will be studying public affairs at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs, focusing on education policy at the K-12 level, in particular on bringing Russia and Eastern Europe into the classroom. While at the center, Jordan taught Russian language courses at Columbus International High School, organized numerous conferences and events, and worked with many schools throughout the state.

We at the Center would like to thank Jordan for her years of dedicated service and all around hard work and good humor. Best of luck on your new endeavors!

A new addition to the Center is Derek Peterson, the Center’s new outreach coordinator. Derek graduated in spring 2013 with an MA in Slavic and East European Studies with a specialization in Soviet Central Asian history. He plans to continue his studies at the PhD level in the near future. While working as outreach coordinator, Derek will be responsible for developing presentations and curricula on Eastern Europe and Eurasia for K-12 schools, working with schools, community colleges, and community organizations, and organizing events and conferences. He also serves as the program coordinator for the Polish Studies Initiative.

Join us in welcoming Derek to the Center!